Search results for: "Skillfulness"

  1. Page 142
  2. Locate Your Craving
     … Try to perfect this skill because it’s going to come in really handy as you meditate further, as you try to get more and more insight into what your mind is doing. Try to get so that when the mind moves, you don’t have to move with it. It veers off in a new direction, but you don’t veer along with … 
  3. The Five Hindrances
     … In the Canon, uncertainty is said to be caused by not looking in an appropriate way at what’s skillful and what’s unskillful in your mind. The appropriate way of looking at these things is to see what’s causing suffering and what’s not. You look at your thoughts as part of a cause-and-effect pattern. When you can deal with … 
  4. Active Truth
     … You become more and more skillful, create less and less suffering for yourself and others. That’s how the Buddha proves the principle of action, proves the principle of karma. He doesn’t cite his own memories of previous lifetimes or proof that someone can have a consciousness that goes from one life to the next and then remember what had happened in previous … 
  5. Catch Yourself Lying to Yourself
     … You want to learn to distinguish what’s skillful and what’s not, and not just slough over everything as you practice. Because it’s in seeing the distinctions that you understand the whole process of what the mind is doing, what it’s fabricating. And these distinctions are very subtle. If you don’t learn how to be subtle in your speech and … 
  6. Admit Your Stupidity
     … And if we’re doing it with a lack of skill, we can overcome that. So the teachings keep pointing back right here: What are you doing right now? Right now, you can say you’re trying to stay with the breath. Okay, that’s developing one of the factors for the path to the end of suffering. That’s an appropriate thing to … 
  7. Mindfulness Defined
     … You exert whatever effort is needed to get rid of it and to nourish skillful qualities in its place. That means you’re bringing in other factors of the path: right resolve and right effort. As we’re meditating we’re combining all kinds of qualities of the mind, and you have to be clear about what they are and where they’re separate … 
  8. Train Hopping
     … Things look very different.” You can be a lot more picky about which trains you hop on to next when you actually need to, because now you have the skill of knowing how to hop off whenever you need to. And you find there are a lot of good things around you in the world. There’s a lot of a food, a lot … 
  9. Taking Your Own Medicine
     … It’s our basic skill. It’s the foundation from which everything else emanates. But it’s not all we do. Once you develop the sensitivity that comes with training the mind here as we sit, you want to use it as you go outside—in particular, to keep watch over yourself. If you just meditate for the sense of peace and calm that … 
  10. Start with Yourself
     … You can push back a little bit, but you push back in a skillful way by creating a sense of well-being inside. So when you combine that sense of well-being with the thought, “May all beings be happy,” you realize that that’s the kind of thought you want to act on, the kind of feeling you want to act on. When … 
  11. Paying Off Your Debts
     … It’s one of those skills that we’ve lost in the modern world. All our devices are our memories. But as you’re facing death, things will come into the mind—all kinds of bits and snatches of songs and sayings and all kinds of things. So you want to have some good things that will come sloshing in to help save you … 
  12. Therapy for the Mind
     … What arises and leads to skillful qualities? What arises and leads to unskillful qualities? That’s penetrative. And for that, you need to start questioning things. Say that lust comes into the mind, and you have your ways of going with it. You have to block them, saying, “I’m not going to go with it this time.” See how the mind reacts. You … 
  13. Rites of Passage
     … What happens? Is that a skillful way of labeling the pain? Could you label it some other way? Can you label it simply as “sensation” instead? Can you step back and simply watch the pain and the perception as a series of events, part of a causal chain? What kind of freedom comes when you do that? This is how the teaching that the … 
  14. Creativity & Play
     … It inspires you to get skillful. That’s a positive side of the sense of self. It also reminds you that you’re responsible for your happiness, that you can’t sit around and simply expect it to come to you. That’s another positive side to the sense of self. And in the practice we’re encouraged to think in that way. This … 
  15. Examine Your Happiness
     … The Buddha was often clear about the fact that skillful practices can involve both pain and pleasure, and that unskillful practices can involve both pleasure and pain. You’ve got to look past the immediate pleasure and pain to sort out which kind of happiness, in the long term, is worth pursuing. With every effort you make, you want to examine: What’s the … 
  16. A Refuge Inside
     … You work on it; you try to make it into a skill. So don’t be in a hurry to let go of everything, because there are certain things you’ll have to hold on to. As long as the mind has this tendency to hold on, give it something good to hold on to. The Buddha taught that his teaching is like a … 
  17. Truth Without Air Quotes
     … You also learn which kinds of intentions are skillful, which kinds are not. And you can see how they have an impact on your life. As you start holding to the precepts, your life is going to change. The world around you is going to change. That sensitizes you to one of those factors that comes before sensory contact: intention. Even more so when … 
  18. Limitations
     … The Buddha mentions this as an important skill, but he doesn’t give any examples. It’s up to you to think of how you can use your imagination. Think of Ajahn MahaBoowa, with the different questions he asked about his pains, focused how he perceived them. Does the pain have an intention? Does the pain have a shape? Is it the same thing … 
  19. Dharma Medicine
     … There are times when your I and your mine can be skillful and times when they’re not. The type of activity that creates a sense of self is where you have a sense of control. That’s self-activity or selfing, and you do have a certain measure of control. You can decide to focus on the breath; you can decide to wander … 
  20. The Fabrication of Pain
     … And the way we get past it is, basically, to learn some skills in fabrication. So look at how you’re fabricating—your breath, the way you talk to yourself around the pain, the perceptions you bring to the pain. And think about the other feelings that there are in the body. You can create a sense of ease in different parts of the … 
  21. Smoothing It
     … basically, to delight in the fact that you can abandon unskillful qualities and develop skillful ones. As the Buddha said, if we couldn’t do that, there wouldn’t have been any point to his teaching. All too often, we delight in coming up with desires and then seeing what we can do to fulfill those desires. A lot of them have to do … 
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